How Does Your Institution Handle Student Course Access?

[alexander_mitch]

I'm trying to get a sense of the wider Canvas community's approach to student access to a course. When does a student gain access? When do they lose access (if ever)? The LMS provides lots of options around this, and we're looking at our peers to help guide our department's advocacy for future policymaking.

I'll start first. This is the status quo for us—

1. I work at a smaller Art and Design College.
2. We provide access to a course the Sunday before the first day of class (or earlier if an instructor chooses.)
3. Students lose the ability to access or interact with a course 3 weeks after the last day of the course.

Thanks for anyone willing to share their policy around this!

[JessicaDeanSVC]

Hi there! I am at a community college with an enrollment around 4,000. We are pretty loose with this. We generally start the term 10 days before classes begin and end the term two weeks after the end of the quarter. However, instructors have the ability to change those dates to whatever they would like it to be for their individual courses. This tends to be a bit of an issue for getting courses published by the first day of the quarter, or instructors forgetting to add a course end date so it ends up staying on student dashboards, but those are easily addressed. Additionally, students access to a course is ended at the course end date, but an instructor can remove that and make the course accessible to their students indefinitely.

[lgarmire]

Access is handled in 2 ways. Students' initial access to courses is handled by our SIS. Then we also have Term dates in Canvas. If a course has multiple sections, Fall & Spring, then there are section dates that are more specific for access. So we do it by SIS to get to Canvas and then term & section dates within Canvas.

Laura

[Hildi_Pardo]

We are a K12 district.   

1. We provide access to a course on the first day of the Term -- yearlong, semester, or quart -- or earlier if an instructor chooses in Settings.
2. Students lose the ability to interact with the course on the Last day of the Term -- unless the teacher changes the setting so they can no longer view/access after -- otherwise students can go to their Past Enrollments and view the concluded course (except they cannot view quizzes).

[AinslyHayes]

Using canvas, from your profile you can edit students and also access to courses. Besides that as a student I recommend you to use https://papersowl.com/examples/sea-level-rise/ to diversify these courses, I usually use it to make them more interesting, because I get a lot of useful and developing information from there, like sea level rise.